[exim] /etc/aliases not working as expected

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Author: Jacob Rau
Date:  
To: Exim-users
Subject: [exim] /etc/aliases not working as expected
Hello,

I'm digging everywhere and racking my brain, and not getting anywhere.

I have exim set up on Debian to send all email through my GMail account
as a smarthost. It works. However, any pieces of mail addressed to root
are sent to root@the domain I set in the "dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config"
setup. (I know this because cron is crapping out every 20 minutes. I
will figure that out later). Since root@??? doesn't exist, I got a
wad of undeliverable messages. After that, I changed the domain to be
jacobarau.com but expect several more undeliverables, as the firewall
doesn't have a rule for mail.

I learned from many sources that I could edit /etc/aliases. And I did.

#
# Mail aliases for sendmail
#
# You must run newaliases(1) after making changes to this file.
#

# Required aliases
postmaster:     jacob.rau@???
MAILER-DAEMON:  jacob.rau@???


# Common aliases
abuse:          jacob.rau@???
spam:           jacob.rau@???


# Other aliases
root: jacob.rau@???

That's the contents of my /etc/aliases. I ran newaliases both as me and
as root, just to be sure it wasn't sensitive to who runs it. And still,
email that is to be sent to root is sent to root@domain, completely
ignoring my /etc/aliases.

Any new ideas? /etc/aliases has no effect whatsoever, despite the
leagues of people on mailing lists vouching for it.

Jacob Rau